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Chapter 1: Every Day I Have the Blues . . . Hallelujah!
17
Traditional electric blues, as practiced today by Robert Cray, Buddy Guy,
and B.B. King
Blues rock, which was started in the 1960s by British electric guitarists
and continues on through Eric Clapton and John Mayer
Acoustics and electrics both produce great blues music, as will virtually any
other type of guitar, whether it’s an acoustic nylon-string classical or a purple
metallic-flake solidbody with green lightning bolts. The blues is unrestricted
when it comes to instruments.
Today, acoustic and electric blues each offer a guitarist a world of history,
repertoire, styles, instruments, techniques, and heroes to study and emulate.
It’s no longer a conflict of “go electric or be a front-porch picker,” as it may
have seemed in the late 1930s. Many players, Eric Clapton being a notable
example, are excellent acoustic-blues players and have paid tribute in concert
and in recordings to their acoustic blues roots.
Though you should always strive for the best guitar you can afford, be aware
that blues guitarists from Robert Johnson on often played cheap instruments
like Stellas, Kalamazoos, and Nationals. Hound Dog Taylor performed timeless
slide classics on 1960s Japanese solidbody guitars. Sometimes the
funkier the guitar, the funkier the blues can be.
Getting a Grip on How Guitars Work
To understand why the guitar works so well for the blues, you must first
understand how guitars work in the first place. In the next sections, take a
look at how guitars produce their tone and how your approach to them
makes them so expressive.
You’ve gotta use your hands —
both of them
Of course, you play any instrument with your hands, but in the guitar, the
two hands perform different tasks — unlike the piano or saxophone where
both hands engage in the same kind of action. In a guitar, one hand strikes
the strings (usually the right hand), and one hand decides what pitch to
sound through fretting. The left hand’s job doesn’t end with just fretting,
either. It has additional functions, too, when it comes to connecting notes
together through slurs (covered in Chapter 10), which it can do without the
right hand. The left hand is also responsible for two very important blues
guitar techniques: vibrato and string bending (also discussed in Chapter 10).
TEAM LinG